Jeff Hancock is the founding director of the stamford social media lab and a professor in the department of communication. His research seeks to understand psychological and interpersonal processes in social media like trust, deception, relationships and emotion. Social media allows us to communicate so much about ourselves, our beliefs, our ideas, desires, hopes, fears and, most importantly, our identities. We need to express ourselves and share our identity and identify with other people.
“Psychology trumps technology,” says Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford.
“If you want to understand what's going on in social media, the first place to start is with what's going on psychologically.”
On the latest episode of *Think Fast, Talk Smart,* lecturer and podcast host Matt Abrahams sits down with Professor Hancock, to talk about the communication tendencies, styles, and mistakes of social media users. “Whenever there's a new kind of technology ... our focus is on what it's doing,” Professor Hancock says. “But I think over time what we end up realizing is that it's still people using it to accomplish things. And I think when we start to when we step back … we can get a sense of what really is changing.”
Connect: